New Way Of Approach In Buddhist Studies

Author(s): Hajime Nakamura
Publisher: Hajime Nakamura

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RELIGIOUS STUDIES IN JAPAN
through their own efforts. To have broken the first three Bonds is what Christians should call conversion, and what Buddhists call 'the entrance into the stream'. Having attained the final 'assurance', there can then be no permanent relapse. Sooner or later, in this birth or another, final salvation is assured, according to the teaching of Southern Buddhism. So, to avoid evil dispositions is encouraged. “Evil deeds are done from motives of partiality, enmity, stupidity and fear. But inasmuch as the Noble Disciple is not led away by these motives, he does no evil deed through them". (Sigalovada, 5)
The fact that man is defiled by vices was lamented by ancient sages in other countries also. Confucius tells us that the things that make him sad are "that virtue is not cultivated, that knowledge is not made clear, that people hear of duty and do not practise it, that people have evil in themselves and do nothing to improve”. (Lun Yu VII, 3.) The Gospel of John reads: 'This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds ere evil'.
To illustrate the Buddhist view of sin: King Ajatasattu killed his father in order to occupy the throne of the king. But, having heard the sermon of the Buddha, he expressed the feeling of repentence before the Buddha. “Sin has overcome me, Lord, weak and foolish and wrong that I am, in that, for the sake of sovereignity, I put to death my father, that righteous man, that righteous king! May the Blessed One accept it of me, Lord, that do so acknowledge it as a sin". The Buddha replied: "Verily, O king, it was sin that overcame you in acting thus. But inasmuch as you look upon it as sin (accaya), and confess it according to what is right, we accept your confession as to that. For that is custom in the discipline of the noble ones, that whosoever looks upon his fault as a fault, and rightfully confesses it, shall attain to self-restraint in future", (Digha-nikaya, Vol. I, p. 85.)
The Buddhist conception of sin is of ethical significance. “The first obvious contrast between Buddha and the mystics who have been in greater or lesser degree neo-Platonic, appears in their respective attitudes towards the problem of evil. For Plotinus evil has no intrinsic reality, it is only an absence of the good. One may recognize in Plotinus himself an element of genuine spirituality......and one may at the same time insist on the danger of this notion that evil is mere deprivation, it tends to discredit everything that is felt negatively and restrictively, to associate the pursuit of the good with expansive longing rather than with renunciation. ... ... The reaching out towards the 'infinite' in this sense is at all events alien to a teacher who held that the higher will in man